The Unnameable Monster in Literature and Film

Maria Beville

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135052294
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Gothic, Romance, & Horror Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book visits the 'Thing' in its various manifestations as an unnameable monster in literature and film, reinforcing the idea that the very essence of the monster is its excess and its indeterminacy. Tied primarily to the artistic modes of the gothic, science fiction, and horror, the unnameable monster retains a persistent presence in literary forms as a reminder of the sublime object that exceeds our worst fears. Beville examines various representations of this elusive monster and argues that we must looks at the monster, rather than through it, at ourselves. As such, this book responds to the obsessive manner in which the monsters of literature and culture are 'managed' in processes of classification and in claims that they serve a social function by embodying all that is horrible in the human imagination. The book primarily considers literature from the Romantic period to the present, and film that leans toward postmodernism. Incorporating disciplines such as cultural theory, film theory, literary criticism, and continental philosophy, it focuses on that most difficult but interesting quality of the monster, its unnameability, in order to transform and accelerate current readings of not only the monsters of literature and film, but also those that are the focus of contemporary theoretical discussion.

1 Monsters as We Know Them

A History of Named Monsters

Over the course of written history, it has been demonstrated that that which is deemed ‘monstrous’ is fundamentally ‘other’. Human identity was, and still is, formed through an important relationship with the notion of Otherness manifested in the idea of the monster. The monster, in terms of cultural representation, regularly traverses border-scapes of subjectivity in cultures that at times recognise, and at others, reject, essential difference. In modern history, the cultural values of particular societies were consistently defined in relation to the tenets of the monstrous. Those who transgressed the limits of the acceptable were repositioned within the framework of the ‘abnormal’ and subsequently identified as monsters. From witch trials in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to twentieth century tabloid headlines featuring criminals and terrorists as monsters, the monster has been repeatedly imagined in opposition to the ‘human’. This process of othering that has so long been a part of our conceptualisation of the monster, blocks our most basic cognitive strategies for understanding difference. Where another's actions are inconceivable from a subjective point of view, we remove them from notions of ‘human’ experience. Thus, many human figures, historically, and in contemporary society, are viewed as having ‘abdicated their humanity’ by choosing to partake in transgressive behaviours (Asma 2009: 8). Invariably, this has been seen to reveal that every human has the potential to become a monster. Read another way: we all have a monster within.

Prior to the Enlightenment, the monster was, at various times, either incorporated into, or refused by western culture. Monsters were most often imagined as the adversary, but in many cases they also engaged a protective role. The changing status of the monster from aggressor to protector became more complicated over time as the human-monster binary consistently extended and retracted its meaning potential in relation to good and evil, influenced by the politics of religion and science. Since the Enlightenment, the monster has been consigned for the most part to the sphere of the imaginary, whereby its relevance to philosophy, aesthetics, and cultural theory remains fixed within the strata of culture and representation. In this context, the monster has been considered primarily in terms of its diversity of forms, and very rarely in terms of phenomenological presence beyond the scope of language and perception. In almost all modern approaches to the monster, the focus is drawn to our responses to, and awareness of, the monster. This leads to a neglect of the monster as a fundamental form that is not time or culture bound and emphasis is placed on the epistemology, rather than the ontology, of the monster. In pursuing this assertion, this chapter will investigate our long-standing cultural obsession with naming and categorising the monster via a general history of the classification of freaks and monsters. This history will be undertaken in order to highlight how the monster has come to be misrecognised in modern culture (in particular in terms of its representation in popular literature and film) as a result of our generalised desire to contain its irreducible alterity.

THE MONSTER AS A PERCEPTUAL METAPHOR

It can be argued that over time we have continuously engaged in a repression of our incapacity to manage the unrepresentable dimensions of the monster. This is evidenced in countless attempts that have been undertaken to categorise and compartmentalise its ineffable Otherness. A general fixation with labelling the monster has resulted in a profusion of accepted and often incompatible meanings for the term. ‘Monster’ has developed from being a conceptual term signifying unknown Otherness, to a normatised sense of the different and the deviant that is frequently part of the very structures through which we perceive Other and Same. The main contention of this discussion is that the monster ‘as we know it’ today is a metaphor. However, it does not originate in literary and cinematographic metaphors that have developed a strong cultural resonance over time. Nor is it merely derived from metaphors on the level of thought or ideas. Conversely, the monster may be understood as perceptual metaphor and the simultaneous universality and specificity of the monster can be accounted for through a phenomenological approach. A consideration of our perception of those aspects of the monster that are not linguistically contingent reveals how the monster functions as a referent of the unrepresentable.

From a phenomenological perspective, the monster exists in thought, an area in which it is contingent upon the physicality of perception. This approach, in its acknowledgement of biological factors, can potentially be seen to overlap with certain evolutionary theories of the monster. However, the problematics of the monster in linguistic terms, which are due to the fact that it is an empty signifier, position it closer to the realm of pure thought, whereby it retreats continuously from consciousness and expression in spite of the fact that we can still perceive it. In this view, the appropriation and normalisation of the monster as a cultural signifier that ultimately represents a void, evidences how the monster exits representation at the point of perception. The metaphorical dimensions of the monster in cultural terms, as outlined by Schneider and Asma, among others, are founded upon contrived structures of Otherness and excess which parallel the artificial structures of identity. Understanding the monster as a perceptual metaphor, rather than as a ‘conceptual metaphor’ (Schneider 1999), removes it from binomial systems of understanding allowing us to recognise (although within a shifting and difficult theoretical framework) how the monster endures outside language as an inaccessible Other. Taking my claim from the abstract to the practical, and demonstrating the cultural relevance of a theory of the monster which temporarily removes it from culture, it is arguable that such an approach to the monster is particularly relevant to our contemporary media-addicted culture, and also to the conditions of postmodernity. This is because virtual and simulated cultural frameworks reveal the anti-narratives and micro-narratives that undermine the grande narratives of former, less secular, cultures. As Botting notes about these contexts in his book Gothic Romanced: ‘in a world without sacred forms or rituals, without metanarratives, the traces of old monsters, romanced for their telling position at cultural limits, begin to tell a grander story … a truth more real, because darker and less evident’ (2008: 15). In this way, the grande narratives of the monster, as told from dominant perspectives such as psychoanalysis and evolutionary theory, can be deconstructed to reveal the voids of language to which the monster ultimately belongs.

Making the argument that the monster is a perceptual metaphor, rather than a conceptual metaphor does not reject either Schneider, or for that matter George Lakoff 's original model of the metaphor; it builds upon it. According to Lakoff , conceptual metaphors are metaphors which, through processes of linguistic and cultural change, come to regulate our thinking and our behaviour. They can even eff ect our perception. In the opening chapter of Metaphors We Live By (2008), Lakoff and Mark Johnson argue for the pervasive nature of metaphor in everyday language, thought, and action. Metaphor, they claim, is so culturally prevalent that much human experience is structured by it and the proof of this can be deduced from linguistic study. Taking this theory as a basis for his discussion of the monster as an uncanny metaphor, Schneider builds an argument which claims that the monster is a conceptual metaphor. Focusing specifically on horror film monsters, he proposes that understanding the monster as a conceptual metaphor accounts for the ubiquitous presence of monsters in modern culture. I would like to take this reading further and to consider in more detail the relationship between monster and language. Using the term ‘perceptual metaphor’ is to reflect this move and to focus on perception and language rather than cultural structures. It is also to relate that while the ‘monster metaphor’ in certain popular usages influences our formation of ideas, in many others it extends to influence our perception in a way that subsequently is reflected in our language, or lack thereof (in the case of the unnameable).

This chapter, in surveying historical obsessions with naming and understanding the monster, highlights the nature of our consistent over-exposure to the idiomatic use of the monster metaphor, so much so that the monster has become integral to the creation of personal perspectives on reality and identity. The theories of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in his Phenomenology of Monsters as We Know Them Perception, are central to this point. In his consideration of ‘the body as expression, and speech’, Merleau-Ponty reinforces the connection between thought and language, stating that ‘thought is no internal thing, and does not exist independently of the world and of words’ (2005: 213). While Lakoff also reinforces this point (although from the frameworks of cognitive linguistics), Merleau-Ponty's rejection of the notion of private language and Lockean notions of thought and language is founded in the idea of the embodied experience of the external world of meaning. Thus, the subjective experience of the life-world can only exist through ‘donning already available meanings, the outcome of previous acts of expression’ (213). As a result, thought and expression arise concurrently because of the interaction of the body and ‘our cultural store’ of meanings. To summarise: thought and expression are formed concurrently in a process wherein our cultural store works in the service of this unknown law while the body initiates a new formation of gesture practice. Merleau-Ponty makes this argument with the aim of highlighting the formative role of the body with regard to perception and meaning, which is at the centre of his entire phenomenological project. However, his claim that ‘pure thought reduces itself to a certain void of consciousness’ (213) and his assertion of the power of intentionality, both have repercussions for understanding our personal experiences of prevalent ideas within a given culture. As such, they also have particular relevance for understanding the monster as a metaphor as it moves from the universal to the private sphere. Similarly it can account for the fact that we can sense what the monster is, even though it evades our attempts to define it and to position it in relation to culturally available meaning.

BETTER THE MONSTER YOU KNOW
THAN THE MONSTER YOU DON'T

From ancient mythological monsters to the monsters of sea-faring legend, the inherent contradictions to be found in narratives of monstrosity reveal the heterogonous nature of cultural anxiety. They also establish the essential paradox of the monster as the unrepresentable. The monsters of religious texts often move in the direction of the philosophical and mark interesting turning points in the cultural positioning of the monster throughout history. In particular, they highlight concerns with notions of plurality and with the idea of the God-image. In light of these religious monsters, it is interesting to note the interpretation of the monster in various cultural moments as ‘archetype’, and the textual and visual representations of the devil which are central to this. Similarly, a consideration of the impact of historical developments in science on our cultural approaches to the monstrous reveals much about our relationship to Otherness, but even more about the human obsession with naming and categorisation that stems from an essentialist and anthropocentric point of view. Nineteenth century studies in physiognomy and criminology for example, emphasise the problematics of Darwinian accounts of human development; the repercussions of which can be seen in the history of literature and art and the varied monstrous representations of the East and of colonised others therein. To account for these issues, this inquiry into the history of ‘named monsters’ will function to counterpoint later analyses of those monsters that have remained unnamed and unnameable in cultural representation. Mimicking the logic of the narratives herein, I will begin at the beginning with the concept of myth, and the mythological creatures that occupy an originary space in the development of the monster as we ‘know’ it today. But first, some points on methodology.

The method of historical examination here is not postmodern despite the fact that it takes much inspiration from the ideas of post-structuralist theory, in particular those of Michel Foucault. In The Order of Things, Foucault notes that within the entire Classical theory of language,

if all names were exact, if the analysis upon which they are based had been perfectly thought out, if the language in question had been ‘well made’, there would be no difficulty in pronouncing true judgements [ … ] But the imperfection of analysis, and all the slight shifts caused by derivation, have caused names to be attached to analyses, abstractions, and combinations that are in fact illegitimate. There would be no disadvantage in this (any more than in giving names to fabulous monsters) if words did not posit themselves as being representations of representations: with the result that we cannot think of a word— however abstract, general, and empty it may be—without affirming the possibility of what it represents (2001: 115–16).

In this, Foucault highlights the fallibility of judgement in the context of the imperfect and unnatural linguistic and cultural structures that position the individual and the outsider in relation to society. The illegitimacy of names, he points out, intensifies the problem of false representation. While true representation is impossible, representation is nevertheless enforced and judgement is affirmed in relation to the named, regardless of the level of its abstraction and difference.

The narratives of history and the invention of signifiers of Otherness form a part of a suggested continuum of progress that is separated from the history of monsters in a process of positive affirmation. As Foucault notes, casting aside those that exceed the standard of the alleged ‘natural order’ allows us to sustain the standard in opposition to the atypical. ‘As we move in one direction, moving in the other direction is a continuous aberration of forms’ (2001: 170). Importantly, it is worth noting that throughout history, monsters, as abjections from the primary narrative, are met with fear and rejection as well as curiosity. While terrifying, they represent the uncanny field of self-identification on one level, and the establishment of culture on another. But the move from fearsome Other to the ‘strange’ and ‘bizarre’ can only occur through an imposed linguistic positioning whereby the extraordinary unnameable ‘Thing’ is controlled and limited.

Over the course of the last two millennia, from natural science to natural selection, the monster has gone through a process of change based on tension between acceptance and rejection of its excessive difference. Influenced largely by developments in theology and philosophy, the place of the monster has shifted regularly from being a fearsome and exotic other with origins in faraway places, to a proximal other that bears uncanny and disturbing resemblance to ourselves. Christianity depicts this tension wonderfully in its texts and narratives, outlining monstrous and hybrid creatures that are at certain points harbingers of divine authority, and at others, figures of limitless chaos and destruction. As a result of the great voyages and conquests of the middle ages, an increase in knowledge of other cultures and peoples brought the possibility of monstrous races ever closer. This resulted in a new wave of even more fabulous creatures that were woven into travel tales and physically fabricated through fakery and counterfeiture in order to maintain the narrative of the other as a dangerous alien.

In recognising new others, western Christian societies responded with appropriate questions: if monsters are God's creation and are ‘like’ us, can they be saved? Do monsters have free will? What is it that makes a monster monstrous? Likewise, the ‘enlightened’ eighteenth and nineteenth centuries responded to these issues both creatively and intellectually through literary expressions of the monstrous in the Gothic novel and philosophical considerations of aesthetics and the nature of human fear. Prior to this, the Cartesian separation of mind and body had, of course, raised the issue of incoherence between human nature and physical appearance. Darwin later broke the divide that was held to exist between human and animal. All of this enlightened retraction from long standing binarisms of human and monster, appeared to be too much for European culture to bear, and so, in the late nineteenth century with the dawn of modern psychology, there emerged a series of vigorous ‘scientific’ attempts to rectify this blurring of the monster's identity and to reinstate the idea that what looks evil, must in fact be, evil. Theories of physiognomy and craniometry attempted to measure monstrosity repeating an age-old cultural practice. With ‘science’ on its side, however, this effort at managing the monstrous was granted a new legitimacy, and with it the power to cause some of the most horrific events of the twentieth century.

In spite of this long history of efforts to handle the monster through categorisation, the latter half of the twentieth century did not produce any theoretical consensus on the monster. General studies of the monster persisted with the taxonomical approach that began with Aristotle. Even in contemporary theory and criticism we can still find an abundance of theories which deal with the function of the monster in culture and society. Countless teratologies have been produced with the aim of quantifying and qualifying the monster, but to no satisfying conclusions about the monster as it is trans-historically and trans-culturally relevant. In spite of two millennia of monster management, the fundamental excess of the monster refuses containment and continues to escape our grasp.

The manner in which we frame the identification of the monster is problematic. In constituting the idea of our own monstrous potential as humans, we either pursue the setting up of a binary that can be crossed but not traversed between human and monster/Other, or we take a more ethical position and note our own capacity for transgression, and acknowledge the otherness within. There is a stubborn obstacle to achieving the latter perspective and that is the general cultural tendency to equate ‘monster’ with ‘evil’ and to externalise evil as that which is radically Other and a serious threat to that which is defined as ‘good’. Thus, the phenomenon of e...